Objective
My main goal in this phase was to further understand the needs of each person we interviewed to convert them into design opportunities. My team and I accomplished this goal by creating 3 personas and 3 user journey maps. We prioritized students, faculty, and parents because these user groups would be the main audience for a Visual Communication website.
Personas
While creating our individual 3 personas, I learned how to put myself in someone else’s shoes. I used the responses we got from our interviewees to help me decide what each person’s goals, needs, and challenges were.
After each team member finished their individual tasks, we brought them all together. I was in charge of combining our student personas into one final version. Creating a fake alias and knowing the real challenges that some students had allowed this persona, Sienna Love, to have a realistic feel. I also included a bit of personal insight from when I was a freshman, since I had some issues with attaining information about the program as well. I think that writing down the specific needs that Sienna had helped me through the process of brainstorming ways to address her needs.
User Journey Maps
In my opinion, creating user journey maps was very useful because it helped me better understand the personas using a specific scenario with a defined start and ending phase. Most of the time, I tend to overlook what specific actions someone might take to complete their goal, so making up some actions and touch points helped me practice taking time to think about how a person might act.
I found the touch points to be an important aspect of the user journey map because I wanted to demonstrate how the students I interviewed had to go through many different methods of learning information without having a dedicated Visual Communication website. Even with our program’s sub-page, the information was incredibly surface-level, which led to the students having
many questions.
With all of our personas, I realized that the majority of their emotions were negative. I think that this made it easier to know which areas needed improvement, regarding their experience with a lack of information about
this program.
Challenges
Initially, it was a bit difficult to come up with characteristics that our personas had. I think that I was too hung up on what their personality would be like. Though practicing this skill felt useful because designing a website is all about the users’ experience. Discovering what potential users’ goals, needs, and challenges are helps web designers to create a successful experience for our audience.
Conducting the user journey maps individually was the hardest part for me because I had trouble coming up with different stages for the scenario. I was specifically struggling with the parent and faculty user journey map because I was stuck in the mindset that students would be the top priority for a VisComm website. At first, I couldn’t think of a good enough reason for the faculty, since I felt like they wouldn’t need to go back to a hypothetical website if they already knew all the information about the program.
Similar to my empathize blog, the define phase has helped me grow as a designer because it helped me practice organizing insights gained from our empathize phase and study our personas’ pain points to turn them into design opportunities. I would’ve had a harder time coming up with design opportunities if I didn’t understand what specific issues our personas had.
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